Higher Ed Data Stories

In eighth grade, a teacher introduced my class to the Statistical Abstract of the United States , and it changed the way I looked at numbers and information.  Of course, in those days, it was just a book, and very hard to interact with.  But I still remember poring over it, absorbing interesting, if arcane, facts about the country and its regions.  Ever since, I've been fascinated with reference books like it. Then, sometime about 2005, I came across the Census Atlas of the United States , and my mind was blown even more.  It contains page after page of maps, representing gobs of data, visualized in a way that tells stories, sometimes with a single picture.  One map, especially, made an impression on me. It's in this chapter, page 14 of the chapter, page 40 of the book , showing Prevalent Asian Group, by county.  If you can't download that large .pdf file, it's below: In my job, and in higher education in general, we think about race and ethni...

In case the coverage of the 2016 presidential election didn't convince you, this might help you see why people in the rest of the country seem different somehow. The data are from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, in 2012; this shows the educational attainment of adults 25-34 in that year.  Use the control at top right to pick a value to display on the map, and the states (represented by hex boxes here) change color to show the value you've chosen.  The bar chart also updates. There are seven values: Less than a HS Diploma shows the percentage of the population in that state aged 25-34 that did not complete high school HS Diploma or Less shows the number above plus the percentage of people who have just a high school diploma Exactly a HS Diploma shows just that: Everyone who graduated from high school but did not continue HS Diploma or Higher is the percentage with at least a high school diploma, including everyone who went beyond that Bachel...

This is the second part of my visualization of graduation rates from NCES. Part I is right below this one, or if  you want, you can click here to open it in a new window. People in higher ed, and especially in government, talk a lot about graduation rates, and the presumption is this: That graduation rates are something we credit or blame on the colleges; that is, something a particular college does determines whether or not its graduation rate is high.  If Princeton stopped caring, presumably, its graduation rate would collapse. Well, maybe.  Probably not, though. We can see that a single factor, such as percentage of students in the freshman class with Pell, or the mean SAT score, can predict with some precision the graduation rate of a college or university.  If you don't believe me, see for yourself . There is some variation in rates of colleges with similar profiles, of course, and people believe--correctly, or incorrectly, I'm not sure--that this is t...

I like the NCES Digest of Education Statistics, but some of the reports they present are almost unusable.  If you've ever tried to visualize a report like this , you know what I mean.  If anyone from NCES is reading this, please help and encourage the good people there to put data in a cleaned, unformatted report. But, on to the data.  This is pretty simple, actually, and it bounces off previous visualizations I've done that show graduation rates are as much an input as an output .  The data are presented in three views: Over time, summarized for a single year, and by institutional type.  Click on the tabs to see them all, and use the filters on the right to select subsets.  You may want to look at women, or Hispanic students, for instance, and you can do so here. There are some interesting patterns here.  It's clear that women, across the board, have higher graduation rates than men; and that colleges are not serving African American men very well...

A recent article in the Washington Post piqued my interest: Why the University of Oregon turned to neighboring states for students , by colleague Roger Thompson. Some of this is no surprise, of course. I've been looking at NCES and WICHE data for years, and even visualized the latter to show how demographics will change enrollment profiles at colleges across the country. Lots of publics realize this, and lots have attempted to enroll larger numbers and percentages of students from outside their states. There's more to it than population, however: It's one of education's worst-kept secrets that students who travel farther to college come from families with higher incomes (or vice versa, of course), and in general, so do students who cross state lines for their education. Public universities have discovered that high out-of-state tuition makes them less desirable, and so have recently adopted a revenue maximization model, often offering large discounts to non-resid...

This is three years of data from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics, breaking out all bachelor's degrees awarded by ethnicity, gender, and discipline.  For the sake of clarity, I rolled many of the disciplines together, and on at least one view, rolled up ethnicities into groups as well. The first view simply takes a look at ethnicity and gender: What do Asian women, or Hispanic men study in college?  Eight views on one dashboard, showing some interesting stuff: 30% of Asian women study Science and Math, compared to just 9.5% of African American men.  Business always dominates with men, except Hispanic men.  Interesting. Behold the power of DataViz.  This view is the exact same day, just shown a different way to allow you to get a comparative view.  This shows all ethnic groups in the data set, however, and the data in columns adds up to 100%.  So, for instance, in the very top left, of all degrees awarded to Asian women, 19.82% were ...

This is always a popular post: Statistics on the entering class of 2014 at about 1900 colleges and universities across the country.  It's based on IPEDS data, which I downloaded from the IPEDS data center and conditioned.  The source file is here , if you'd like to do something with it yourself. This year, NCES only reports test score ranges for those colleges and universities that require tests for all applicants; in some regard, this makes sense, but it's unfortunate.  At my institution, for instance, about 94% of enrolling students submit tests, and this data might be helpful to students who do plan to apply with tests.  I plan to let NCES know this was not a good idea, and you can, too, if you'd like.  For now you'll know why these colleges don't show up .  You'll have to check with the colleges themselves. This view starts with private, Liberal Arts Colleges in the Great Lakes region, but you can make the list be whatever you want using the filters...

It's happened three times in the last several months: I am invited into, or stumble into, a discussion on "Frontloading."  It's been the case that the people who are talking about it are generally convinced it exists, and generally believe it's a widely practiced approach. In case you don't know, frontloading is the presumed practice of enrollment managers (of course) who make big institutional aid awards to entice freshmen to enroll, and then remove them after the freshman year.  Journalists, especially, point to aggregated data suggesting that the average amount of institutional aid for non-freshmen is lower than for freshmen. "Aha!" they scream, "The smoking gun!" Well, not so fast.  I'm willing to admit that there may be a few colleges in the US where frontloading happens, probably in a clandestine manner, but perhaps, in at least one instance I was made aware of, for a very logical and justifiable reason.  But most enrollment m...

I've had a long-standing rule when publishing to this blog: I don't take requests.  This is for two reasons: First, I do this for fun, and I publish what's interesting to me, hoping you'll find it compelling as well.  Second, the tools available now allow you to answer your own questions fairly easily.  If you like my visualizations but want to ask some more questions, you can download free versions of Tableau Public and explore to your heart's content. But yesterday, when I published this piece on freshman migration, a topic that generated a lot of interest this time and the first time I did it, I admitted this was the most fun I had exploring data.  And I also admitted that I had dozens of views lined up, but, in the interest of keeping things simple, kept just two. Since it's gone live, I've had about 20 people ask me "Could you look at this data this way?" questions.  That's exciting, because I'm always hoping what I publish genera...

Note: Please be sure to hover over a bar on the first chart, below, to see how to interact. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by license plates on cars.  And whenever I found myself in a college parking lot, it was like a buffet, with lots of plates from distant states. Thus, my fascination with freshman migration and out-of-state enrollment was born. IPEDS has finally released 2014 Fall enrollment data, and that means the bi-annual availability of the freshman migration data.  I like visualizing this for two reasons: First, I can think of dozens of ways to show it, all of them interesting to me, and maybe to you, too.  Second, the data is so multi-faceted that it requires viewers to interact, something I've preached about for years: Don't let me decide which data is interesting; decide for yourself how you want to view it. There are two ways I've presented it here.  On the first, you start by looking at the states that exported the most freshmen in 2014. ...

Ever since I started in admissions, people have been talking about demographics changes and challenges, and the chant continues.  The future, we're told, will look very different than the present. Our trade paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, ran an article about how this might affect higher education.  It included lots of interesting charts and graphs, but didn't allow me to look at the data in the ways I wanted to.  So I downloaded it and started looking at it using Tableau. This is as much a testament to self-service BI as it is to the trends in the data.  I've often spoken about the 80/80 rule of business intelligence: 80% of what an analyst gives you, you don't need; 80% of what you want isn't in the report.  I spent a long time playing with and slicing this data to see if I could find a way to present it that makes sense, and that gives people what they want.  And every time I answered a question, I generated several more ("what if" can was...

Yesterday's big news, of course, was the announcement of "The Coalition," the curiously-named group of about 80 colleges and universities making for very strange bedfellows.  I wrote a little bit about it here . Today I came across a little data set that contained information about Pell graduation rates and non-Pell graduation rates, and I thought it an interesting opportunity to look at it in light of yesterday's news.  So, over my lunch hour, I did (yes, this software is really that easy to use. You should try it out .) It's presented here in Tableau Story Points.  Just use the gray boxes across the top to look at the different views of the data.  Most of it should be self-explanatory, but if not, leave a comment and I'll reply to it. FYI, there were several schools from "The Coalition" who did not supply Pell Grant Grad Rate data. In alpha order, they are: Columbia (NY) Hamilton (NY) Harvard (MA) Rutgers (NJ) And you can ask them ...